


a formal feeling comes

by poeticname



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: Angst, F/F, Manga Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-10
Updated: 2015-11-10
Packaged: 2018-04-30 23:12:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5183240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poeticname/pseuds/poeticname
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Touka attends her last day of school.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a formal feeling comes

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings:** a ghoul’s POV of human food, mentioned human-eating, and vomiting. You know, the usual light-hearted content you’d expect from a Tokyo Ghoul canonverse fic.
> 
> When it comes to the manga, canon doesn’t mention or show Touka going to school after the zoo conversation, but I couldn’t find anything saying school ended after that either, so overall I think this fic is on decent canon plausibility ground as far as the timeline goes. Regardless, this fic is a huge departure from what I usually write, so I hope it’s an experiment that turned out well.

The school’s hallway has a sharpness like it’s unfamiliar. 

Touka’s been here hundreds of times, she knows the grey of the lockers and speckled brown of the floor as well as any other third year student, but she’s absorbing their details again today like she’s seeing them for the first time.

She takes a deep breath to memorize the scent as well. 

School smells mostly like human. The human scent was a huge adjustment when she started. She never saw many humans at once when she lived with family, and Anteiku was always mostly ghoul. Being in a confined room with about twenty humans at once had been overpowering, their sweat, their strange tangy shampoos, and the delicious scent lurking inside them all being closer to Touka than ever before. 

All the smells would have been an exercise in self-restraint for a different ghoul, but Touka never had a problem with wanting to eat her classmates in broad daylight. She made absolutely sure she was never that hungry. As it was, class was an exercise in ignoring smell entirely, forgetting about it so she could function as best she could as a human, and by the time she was out of elementary school, even the gymnasium wasn’t a problem.

The memories might have been nostalgic, on another day, but Touka can’t spare emotion for them now.

“Touka-chan!”

Touka closes her locker. She smiles. Her mouth aches with the movement. 

“Good morning,” Touka greets.

Yoriko smiles in return and the school hallway falls out of focus.

“Good morning,” Yoriko returns, walking past Touka to her own locker. Touka trails behind her. “Ready for our last exam-free day?”

Touka had forgotten about exams amidst everything else. To think they were foremost on her mind before the raid is strange. She hasn’t felt a shift in her priorities this drastic in a long time.

“Don’t remind me,” Touka responds. Her test anxiety is so far from her mind now that that lame retort is all she can come up with.

Yoriko’s eyes become droopier, and her smile softens. Touka still doesn’t understand how she can become more soft when she’s already got chub for cheeks and fragile skin all over her, but Yoriko makes it possible.

“You’re too worn down these days. Get some sleep before tomorrow, okay? As long as you do that, you’ll do great!” Yoriko gives her a thumbs up along with the advice.

But the advice is useless to Touka. She's not going to attend the exams so she'll fail without question.

The thought doesn’t affect her. Her heart rate remains steady, she doesn’t clam up, she doesn’t have the creeping sense of dread that she could be a failure in both of her worlds.

“Save the pep talks for the end of the day,” Touka tells Yoriko anyways, flicking her forehead, which prompts Yoriko to pinch Touka’s cheek, and the pair continue onto class that way, each insisting the other’s being ridiculous.

Touka will miss her.

 

\- - - - -

 

Touka would have paid attention to the review lessons of first and second period a few days ago, but it’s not worth it now. She spends most of the morning looking out the window and doesn’t get called on once. Maybe the teachers can tell something’s wrong. She wonders what gossip will be passed around when she goes missing.

Yoriko sits down at Touka’s desk once the morning lessons end, complaining about how she has a whole new set of notes to review tonight. Touka agrees with her, carefully hiding her own blank notebook.

It’s not an eventful lunch. Touka’s packed some human leftovers from Nishiki’s place for appearance’s sake. It would be idiotic not to when a ghoul crackdown happened yesterday.

She doesn’t know what the lunch is, except that Kimi made it. It’s some kind of rice dish, and rice has always looked like insect eggs to Touka, like they could start hatching and escape the plate any minute. There’s a sauce, its colour resembles dung, and there are orange and brown slabs mixed in. They look moist, bordering on appetizing, but there’s a grainy texture to them that reminds her of sand.

Touka starts to stir it. She doesn’t want to look at it for longer than necessary.

“Don’t feel like curry rice today?” Yoriko asks.

Touka feels like an idiot. She should know what curry rice is. The curry rice packets are near the coffee in her neighbourhood grocery store.

“I’m not feeling so well.”

She pushes the food away, like she saw a little boy do in a movie once, and Yoriko’s eyes widen.

Touka hates to draw attention to herself like this and doubly hates to make Yoriko worry, but it's necessary today. She needs her strength for running later.

“You got sick just before exams?” Yoriko asks, incredulously. She’s frowning now. “That’s horrible.”

“I’ll be fine,” Touka feels like she should elaborate on her pretend feeling, but she doesn’t know what human sickness is actually like. All she’s ever had is ghoul injury. “Just some stomach pain.”

“Ooh, that really sucks,” Yoriko looks at Touka’s curry rice sadly. “Maybe you’d feel better if you ate?”

“I don’t think so,” Touka’s speaking quietly now. She doesn’t think she should be too assertive about not eating. “I’ll just pack this up.”

“You should eat at least a little. It may be the cure you didn’t know you needed!” 

Yoriko has endless faith in food. Touka’s never understood it but she likes it. It’s so different from her own relationship to eating.

Yoriko holds out a piece of tamagoyaki. It’s so yellow it looks plastic to Touka, and its haphazard lines look its been squished together by a garbage compacter, ready to fall apart at any moment.

“If you can't stomach curry rice, eat a bit of mine at least.”

Yoriko has a frown on her face and determination in her eyes. 

All she wants is for Touka to feel better.

The food will make Touka feel worse, but Yoriko's determination makes her want to eat it anyways.

Touka tries to tell herself she needs her energy today. Even one bite of human food will take her back a few steps in recovering from everything else Yoriko’s made her eat. Yomo will scold her for indulging like this. 

On the other hand, eating is a part of school too. If Touka can’t do this much, what was the point of even coming?

Touka opens her mouth and she swallows the unnervingly soft yellow thing. She feels it slide down her throat uncomfortably, too large and not solid enough.

Yoriko smiles and nods, satisfied with this result.

Touka will miss her.

 

\- - - - -

 

After lunch, they have physical education. Touka wanted to spend all of lunch with Yoriko so she hasn’t had time to purge. She can feel the tamagoyaki floating in her stomach, a yellow raft on a sea of acid meant to dissolve something else, so the time to go outside is a small comfort since the fresh air settles her nausea a bit.

Touka finds physical education relaxing anyways. A regular pace for a human is leisurely for her. The only real work she has to do is breathing heavily after running. Touka usually takes the class as time to space out, but there isn’t much she wants to think about today, so she stares at her classmates instead. She's only ever been close with Yoriko, so she wonders if any of them will think of her when she’s gone. If the teachers won’t gossip, they certainly will, and they’ll have more inventive theories as well. Maybe one or two will even miss her.

Meanwhile, Yoriko has a difficult time with the running and the jumping and the kicking balls around. As Touka understands it, humans need frequent physical activity to maintain their fitness, and Yoriko doesn’t like physical activity. She insists that a healthy diet is the most important thing for health and a long life, and that she gets her exercise through walking anyways.

Yoriko exits the soccer game panting heavily, and Touka makes sure to smile at her.

“Hard time out there?”

“I’d rather do exams than this,” Yoriko tells her, huffing as she lays down on the grass beside Touka. 

“Good thing you’re doing them tomorrow then.”

Yoriko sighs, “Yeah, once we graduate it’s no more gym forever. That’ll be nice.”

The two fall silent. Yoriko sits up, grabbing her water bottle from beside her, and Touka looks away as she swallows it. She doesn’t like to watch people drink water. It makes her imagine drinking the fluid herself, and the way it's even runnier than coffee makes Touka's skin crawl to imagine it in her throat.

But Yoriko looks so happy after drinking it, heaving such a huge sigh of relief that Touka starts to watch her again. Her face is flushed and sweaty from the activity but so sated. The image makes Touka flush. She almost can’t believe that she’s able to feel attraction after everything that’s happened, but Yoriko’s special. She’s always been special, she’s always been pretty, she’s always eclipsed everything else when Touka’s with her.

That eclipse of feeling is why Touka came to school today. She wanted it one last time before they put their escape plan in motion.

Touka's stomach lurches, forcing the tamagoyaki to the bottom of her throat, and Touka lurches with it.

Yoriko looks over immediately, “You still feel sick?”

Touka nods, scrunching her face as she tries to swallow it again, but it keeps sliding up, like a bar of soap out of her hands, and Touka doesn’t want it back down her throat but she does, she doesn’t want to throw up Yoriko’s food-

“Teacher! Touka’s gonna puke!”

As if by Yoriko’s command, Touka does.

Everyone gasps, but Touka's not focused on it.

The piece of food obviously hasn’t been chewed very well. A perfectly solid bit-shaped blob, bright yellow, covered in ghoul stomach acid, lying in the middle of a high school field. If anyone thinks about it too long, she’s done for.

“Oh dear,” the teacher says, “how did you hold it in while running? Take her to the infirmary, Yoriko-chan, we’ll… Clean this up somehow.”

Touka, still staring in mortification at the spongy thing that just fell out of her mouth, feels Yoriko’s arm coming up under hers, feels herself lifted up by her small, fragile friend.

Yoriko says something in the affirmative to the teacher, who says she’ll check in on Touka after class before yelling something at the other students.

Touka isn’t listening. Purging in front of everyone was too scary to think about anything else. It’s probably a good thing she isn’t coming back.

Yoriko carries her to the infirmary with no protests, only small grunts of effort.

Touka will miss her.

 

\- - - - -

 

The nurse isn’t present when Touka and Yoriko enter the infirmary. There’s no one else resting, either. All there is is an open window, a closed office, and empty beds.

Yoriko lies Touka down on one of the beds and knocks on the nurse’s office’s door. There’s no immediate response, so Yoriko knocks again.

“Don’t bother,” Touka tells her. Her ghoul ears can’t pick up on any movement, so there’s no movement. “I don’t think she’s in there.”

Yoriko frowns, “Where else could she be?”

“Not at school?”

“The nurse should be at school,” Yoriko mumbles, making her way to Touka’s bedside and pulling up one of the chairs there. "Who else is going to help if someone hurts themselves?"

“She needs days off too.”

Yoriko hums in acknowledgement, before falling silent for a few seconds. The window is slightly open, so the curtains flutter, and Touka's eyes are caught by the movement. She can probably use that window, later.

“Do you need anything?” Yoriko asks. “Do you still feel nauseous or should I get you some water?”

Touka feels fine now that the tamagoyaki’s out of her system. She feels content, lying here, having Yoriko look down at her intently, but Touka doesn’t want to drink the water, so she should probably take the other option.

“Still too nauseous,” she says.

“Now if the nurse were here we could get you some medicine for that,” Yoriko sounds mildly annoyed with that, but it makes Touka happier for the nurse’s absence, “but I don’t know what to do in the meantime.”

She leans over, feeling Touka’s forehead abruptly, and the sun from the window illuminates her hair, leaving patches of light across her skin.

“You feel a bit warm, but not much,” she sighs. Some of her hair falls forward. “My mother always put a wet towel on my forehead but I don’t know if that will help since you don’t really have a fever.”

“It’s fine, Yoriko.”

“I wish I could do something,” she says apologetically. “I don’t want you to be sick during exams.”

“Don’t beat yourself up,” Touka insists. “This is just nature.”

Nature made Touka this way, throwing up Yoriko's food no matter how much she wants to digest it.

“I know,” Yoriko shakes her head to herself. “I just wish I could make you feel better. I’ve never seen you sick before.”

She moves her hands to Touka's, twining their fingers together while she lifts her head to make eye contact. Her eyes are large and sad, and her touch is so soft. 

Touka wants to cry.

She doesn’t want to leave Yoriko.

She wants to leave her empty apartment, she wants to leave the remains of Anteiku behind, she wants to leave this school that held none of the promises the manager said it did, but Touka doesn’t want to leave Yoriko.

They’re silent for a moment, holding hands, and everything Touka came to school to say is bubbling up.

What comes up first is:

“I don’t think I’m going to make it to the zoo.”

Yoriko laughs.

Touka’s heart falls.

“Don’t worry about that, you won’t be sick all summer. We’ll get to the zoo eventually.”

Yoriko doesn’t even know she’s saying goodbye. 

This is the way it has to be, a message Yoriko won’t understand until later, pieces that won’t click into place until Touka’s gone and so far that Yoriko’s new knowledge can’t hurt her.

But leaving only these pieces hurts more than anything.

“I’ll miss you.”

“You’re more sick than I thought if you’re this being this sappy,” Yoriko responds, still smiling. “The end of school won’t mean the end of us.”

It wouldn’t, but the end of Touka’s human life does.

“But I know what you mean,” Yoriko says, squeezing Touka’s hand. “I’ll miss seeing you all the time too.”

She takes her hands away. Their warmth lingers in Touka's palms.

Yoriko stands up, “You should nap, anyways. Sleep is the best medicine, and we don’t have any others right now.”

“I’m not sure I can sleep,” Touka’s stalling now.

“Well, let me give you something that will help.”

Touka doesn’t understand what that means. Medicine? Food? A lullaby?

Yoriko bends down and kisses her forehead.

“A good night kiss,” she says.

 _A goodbye kiss_ , Touka’s mind supplies.

Yoriko’s eyes are thin, smiling crescents, then they’re gone as she spins around.

“I should go back to class. You’ll sleep extra well because of that kiss, so make good use of it!”

“Goodbye,” Touka chokes out.

“See you later,” Yoriko tells her.

She lingers in the doorway, and Touka makes sure to look at her.

Yoriko looks prettier than a painting, lit by the sun through the window so her hair shines and even the thin hairs on her face are visible. Her fatty cheeks are pushed up by her smile so her eyes seem slightly smaller, but they’re still large and welcoming and happy. She’s shifting on her feet, reluctant to leave even though she thinks they’ll meet again soon.

Touka will miss her.

They stare a moment more, one last moment of connection and then Yoriko’s gone.

Touka listens to her footsteps through the walls, holding back tears.

She has to undo the window in a moment, she has to sneak out of the building then vault over the fence and then she has to go meet the ghouls waiting for her but still she lies in the bed, curling her fingers in the sheets as she tries to memorize those last few seconds of Yoriko.

Touka will miss her, and not even her life’s first proper goodbye will soften that.


End file.
